Intel Drops Teaser For Upcoming Xe-HPG GPU Architecture
by Ryan Smith on March 18, 2021 5:00 PM EST
With the launch of their first-iteration Xe-LP architecture now firmly in the proverbial rearview mirror, Intel’s GPU division has turned its sights towards its next consumer-focused GPU architecture, Xe-HPG. Today the company has posted a very light teaser video advertising the forthcoming architecture.
Xe HPG microarchitecture teaser = 🍬👀 pic.twitter.com/kdzBokBiW4
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) March 18, 2021
The brief, 30 second promotional video highlights how Xe-HPG is built on top of Intel’s current Xe-LP architecture. And while there aren’t any concrete technical details disclosed within the otherwise abstract video, it’s notable that the video does briefly show 5 layers of blocks on the Xe-HPG chip. Assuming for the moment that Intel isn’t being quite literal here – a 5 layer GPU would be extravagant and hard to cool, to say the least – it’s more likely an allusion to the number of Execution Units (EUs) or some other aspect of the architecture.
Finally, the video also includes a short block of binary text as a further game for the audience to play.
10100000
11101101
11010000
For the moment we don’t have a solid idea of what it means. But no doubt someone will figure it out before too long.
Otherwise, this will no doubt be the first of many teasers for Xe-HPG. While Intel hasn’t provided a more recent roadmap for chips based on the architecture, the company previously announced in 2020 that they were aiming for a 2021 launch. And with the first DG2 chip already in the labs as of October, we know that Intel is well underway in bringing up Xe-HPG silicon.
Update (03/19): Sharp-eyed sleuths have since solved the binary code mystery. As it turns out, the digits are for an IPv4 address, which leads to https://xehpg.intel.com/. According to Intel's page, a scavenger hunt is starting on the 26th, so it looks like Intel will have some additional games for audiences to play.
Source: Intel
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29a - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
They can't make it in house.JayNor - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
They are building Xe-HP in house in 10ESF. They demoed it last year performing at 42TFlop FP32. It doesn't look like they have a problem building GPUs in 10ESF, but no doubt that they still have capacity issues trying to add a potentially popular gaming GPU at the same time as all the other 10nm projects they are launching. The GPUs are good candidates for moving to TSM to expand Intel's capacity.SarahKerrigan - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Xe-HP - the server GPU - is inhouse. Xe-HPG is foundry.tomatotree - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
This is a chiplet architecture, and I believe they're making some of the chiplets (IO die?) in house, but the main compute dies are going to be TSMC for this round of products.ArcadeEngineer - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
HP is chiplet architecture, but it's very unlikely for HPG.Spunjji - Monday, March 22, 2021 - link
"as long as they mostly *just work*"That's the rub. So far, their GPUs don't akways do that.
Pinn - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Was around Intel for both IA64 and Larrabee. Don't have much hope.p1esk - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Yeah, this card gotta be both faster and cheaper than Nvidia. Zero hope.Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Whether it will be better price/perf will depend on the ratio of mining performance to gaming performace. If it has great utilisation but lower peak FLOPS like Navi vs Polaris, or low mem B/W and something like infinity cache then there might be some hopemode_13h - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
I think Intel has traditionally been FLOPS-heavy, and I don't expect Xe-HPG to change that.